Recovery auditors focus on Annual Wellness Visits

Do you provide Annual Wellness Visits (AWV) to your Medicare patients? Are you aware of the different codes to report the visit, depending on whether the patient has had one before? Medicare’s recovery audit contractors(www.cms.gov) (RACs) are apparently finding that some physicians aren't, and that's leading to Medicare overpayments.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) highlights this issue in the January 2014 edition(cms.gov) of its Medicare Quarterly Provider Compliance Newsletter. In the newsletter, CMS notes that Medicare pays for an "initial" AWV for each beneficiary once in their lifetime. All successive AWVs must be billed as "subsequent" AWVs. The corresponding billing codes are:

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